"The End of Capitalism" Lewis Lapham and Lynn Parramore [This is the second installment of "The Influencers," a six-part interview series that Lynn Parramore, the editor of New Deal 2.0 and a media fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, is conducting for Salon. She talked to Lewis Lapham, the former longtime editor of Harper’s and the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, about the nature of American-style capitalism — its beginning, its historical manifestation and, possibly, its end. Q: Historically, what do you see as the dominant characteristics of America? A: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires. You have the notions of risk, of labor put to a productive use, deferred pleasure — ideas that come out of our Puritan ancestry. And Puritans, by the way, were also venture capitalists. The plantation in Plymouth, and then in Massachusetts Bay, was intended to bring money to its investors in London. Capitalism is the promise — it’s the bet on the future. It’s the hope of a new beginning over the next ridge of mountains, around the next bend in the river. It gives the common man a chance. That’s in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The original wording was: life, liberty and property. But happiness and property were almost synonymous in the Calvinist mind!

Immanent Singularities: An Interview with Bruno Gulli Minor Compositions As a philosopher and academic worker, Bruno Gulli is nothing if not untimely. In an era when the labor of thought, the work that creates new concepts, finds itself squeezed by an ever-increasing array of restrictions (from journal and publisher limitations to lack of time from overwork and precarious employment), Gulli bucks these trends in a spectacular fashion. Rather than composing 8000 word chunks of pabulum, simply recycling tired clichés or niceties, Gulli has embarked on composing a three-volume inquiry into the relation between ethics, labor, and ontology. Such an approach might not have seemed all that remarkable fifty years ago, but today to carry out such a fundamental rethinking of our categories of political thought and discourse is paradoxically no longer appreciated, and therefore all the more necessary. Gulli’s first book, The Labor of Fire (2005, Temple University Press) led Michael Hardt to comment that the work of Gulli, along with others carrying out similar work, will renew the Marxist tradition. This renewal, he claims, will not be of a scientific, structuralist, or humanist Marxism, but rather a philosophical approach to Marx centered on the concept of labor its power of social transformation. High words of praise indeed. This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of his most recent book Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010, Temple University Press). Minor Compositions: First off I wanted to ask you about what you describe as the “dignity of individuation.” In particular how does this indicate a shift in theorizing the relation between ethics and politics? Could this perhaps be connected to the Zapatistas’ notion of the dignity of revolt or Simon Critchley’s elaboration (2007) of an anarchic meta-politics based upon the infinite demand of the ethical? Bruno Gulli: “Dignity of individuation” provides a metaphysical (or ontological) grounding for both politics and ethics. Conversely, it says that metaphysical (or ontological) definitions cannot escape a political and (especially) ethical dimension. It is then a synthetic and poetic concept, à la Vico, where some of the most basic problems of the philosophical tradition are reflected and, at the same time, expanded. The concept has two parts: “individuation” refers to, and is drawn from, the principle of individuation (principium individuationis), which, in particular, I understand in terms of John Duns Scotus’ concept of haecceity (or thisness), that is, what makes something the something that it is (but it has a history that goes beyond Duns Scotus). The problem with the concept of the principle of individuation, as Paolo Virno (2009) has also recently pointed out, has to do with the term “principle” – not with “individuation.” The latter indicates a process, and thus individuation is really individuating; the former, I might say from the point of view of my book, is a sign (anticipation or residue) of sovereignty. Conjugating “individuation” with “dignity,” once the word “principle” is eliminated, was for me an act of piracy – an act of piracy within philosophy. Differently from individuation, which can be and is applied to anything, which names the ordinary and regular, dignity is usually reserved for something which, to some degree, is extraordinary, which has distinguished itself for some reason. Even when we speak of human dignity (vis-à-vis other forms of life), we use this type of logic. Thus, the dignity of X indicates a lack, or a lesser degree, of dignity in Y. To say that dignity lies in individuation is to counter this type of logic, and following Leibniz, whose work I use a lot in the first chapter of my book, it is also to affirm that nothing is extraordinary, nothing other than regular, other than orderly – though of an order we may not like, not understand.

33 Lessons on Lenin: For a Marxist Reading of Lenin’s Marxism - Lesson 1 Toni Negri This year we will be working with Lenin, with no intention of reaching a comprehensive definition of this figure, but, rather, to confront a few problems which are born from Leninist thought with the problems which presently face the class movement, and we will do this in three blocs of lessons and some other interval and supplementary appendices. The three blocs of classes are the following: the first bloc has a propaedeutic character, on the internal dynamic of Leninist thought. We will seek to follow the way in which problems are formed in the political theory of Lenin, comparing them with the way in which we tackle similar themes. The second bloc of lessons will make reference, in a more specific form, to the discourse on organization and, in particular, on the subject of the soviet-party in the thought of Lenin. Lastly, in the third group of lessons the focus shall be on the subject of the extinction of the State starting from, on the one hand, from his work The State and Revolution and, on the other, from the actual conditions of the relations of force between classes and the development of the productive forces. In addition to these three blocs of lessons and questions a few notes and appendices (which work around the dialectic in Lenin, on sovietism, on Left-Wing Communism, an infantile disorder) Three blocs of lessons of uneven content and importance. Putting these disproportions aside, the invitation to think and act which a reading of Lenin provokes is so great and thrilling that it will be of great benefit, without a doubt, in this work.
We will begin with the first point: Lenin and us, Lenin and the political experience of the movement of these years and let us ask the question: what has been the contribution of Leninism to our theoretical and political formation? The question begs confrontation and, as happens with any confrontation, there appears implicitly the need for a standard or judgment, which can be radically expressed in this way: we ask if Lenin, for us, continues to mean something, if the method used by Lenin continues to be valid in our current era, and if this corresponds with the practice of investigation and action which, often spontaneously, we have found and renewed within the class struggle. “Spontaneously”; we say this not because ‘spontaneity’ is our religion, but because no one, during the 50’s and 60’s, helped us analyze the class struggle.

"The Origins of Primitivism" Radical Archives Radical Archives is happy to finally present our ‘Origins of Primitivism’ set. It consists of 16 documents related to the development of contemporary primitivist thought, which were first printed in 'Fifth Estate' between 1977 and 1988. All of these documents (listed at bottom) are available online for the first time. Additionally, David Watson has contributed a short introduction and reflection on these texts for the occasion of putting them online. (Radical Archives is an archival website with an emphasis on anarchist, libertarian marxist, situationist and primitivist perspectives. It looks at how these perspectives relate to a number of larger social and philosophical questions – including ontology, technology, religion, spirituality, nationalism and identity. Another strong interest is in Left-Right crossover, including Third Position fascism, and especially in Left antisemitism.)

The Aims of Education McKenzie Wark My fellow educators (by which I mean everyone, as we are all educators). Since our topic today is the aims of education, I thought I would start by imagining how my students would approach such a question. I imagine the first thing they would do is: consult the oracle. Not the oracle of Delphi, the oracle of The Daily Show: Jon Stewart. Not long ago Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show was Tim Pawlenty, the human face of conservatism. While Stewart lobbed surprisingly softball questions at him, Governor Pawlenty explained how we can completely privatize education. Students will just buy their education a course at a time via iTunes on their iPads. Along with downloads of Lady Gaga videos and, for that matter, The Daily Show, you could just download Philosophy 101, or more likely, Marketing 101. I’ll come back to this vision, both thrilling and chilling, of education. Students don’t get all their information by consulting the oracle. They also practice a complex kind of divination using randomly cast spells, or in other words, Google. Using Google somewhat carelessly, one gets at least a fair glimpse of what commonsense opinion is about the aims of education. This commonsense opinion about education is curiously contradictory.

"Politics in the Slum: A View from South Africa" Abahlali baseMjondolo The modern state, and its civil society, have always been comfortable with workers in their allotted place – be it formed around the immediate needs of industrial production, like the migrant workers hostels in apartheid South Africa or contemporary Dubai, or an attempt at creating a haven, like the suburban home which has its roots in the gendered and raced class compromise reached in North America after the Second World War. When there has been a part of the population rendered or considered superfluous to the immediate needs of production there has been a degree of comfort with the inevitably bounded spaces into which these people have been abandoned or contained – prisons, ghettos, Bantustans etc. But both the modern state and civil society have always been acutely uncomfortable with that part of the ‘dangerous class’ - vagabonds or squatters - that are, by virtue of their occupation of space outside of state regulation, by definition out of place and threatening to domination constructed, along with other lines of force, on the ordering of space.

Attention & Zones of Human Resistance: Interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi @ Autonomedia March 30th, 2009 With Malav Kanuga, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Jim Fleming You are suggesting that there is a reversal between the US and Europe. Bifo: Until six months ago, maybe three months ago, you could get the impression that Europe was where movements had a grasp on the institutional level and that the US was in very bad shape. Now all of a sudden it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know what is going to happen in the US but I feel that here – I mean I don’t know what is going to happen between in the relationship the state and US capitalism – but here I feel the ground is ready for a proliferation of social experiments, of cultural initiatives and so on. Europe, on the contrary seems to be eaten by a proliferation of fascist feelings. The economic crisis is probably worse here in the US than in Europe. But the difference is that in Europe we don’t have a federal budget. So what? So the different states are saying very bad things about protectionism but of course everybody is following a protectionist policy. You see Sarkozy against the Czechs, you see Angela Merkel in Germany saying we will not rescue the Lithuanian banks. You see Italy, Spain and Greece sinking more and more into a difficult situation and Germany and France pretending not to see. You see that everybody is going his own way. This could mean in the near future a real squandry of the European Union. The movements are charged with the political task of defending and protecting the cultural meaning of the Union. This could become interesting. The EU has been so far an economic alliance between banks. All of a sudden it could become the object of a social action. But at the same time the protectionists are producing very bad feelings in the population. Like fascism growing in Italy. The same can be said of Lithuania, Estonia, and the Baltic states. In France I have witnessed a very dangerous trend which is the militarization of the banlieues. Militarization in what sense? On one side police and on the other groups of young people using guns against the police. I mean the general trend of the EU landscape seems to be towards an aggressive and right wing radicalization. Of course things can change. But in general this is the trend.

A Countercultural Conversation With Noam Chomsky Mr. Fish The following is an interview with professor Noam Chomsky that was conducted on June 19, 2008 (the 126th anniversary of the invention of American baseball and on what would have been Moe Howard’s 111th birthday), at MIT in Cambridge. The purpose of our conversation was to examine (for a graphic memoir/critique of contemporary culture that I’d just begun working on) the question of why the counterculture, which had been so endemic to the politics of dissent in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, no longer seemed to exist in any viable way. Having used only a small portion of our talk for my book, I felt that the complete exchange was sufficiently interesting to offer up to those who, like me, consider professor Chomsky to be, all by himself, The Beatles of all smart guys, with every interview that he participates in between the publication of his books being the equivalent of Beatle bootlegs, fascinating in their improvised eloquence and revelatory in their matter-of-factness.

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital Michael Hudson [As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010.] Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labor). A free market was one free of such “unearned” income – a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged – and expected – land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away.

Preface to 33 Lessons on Lenin Toni Negri Preface To The Present (Spanish) Edition: This book dates in its current form from 1972/73, although some of its parts were written (written partially) 10 years prior. By all means, however, the form in which these essays/texts are presented are definitive. In re-publishing these lessons I have not believed it necessary in modifying them in any aspect. Why? In their relative ingenuity they are constructive, creative and joyous. How was this text born? How did the idea come to me to write it and why did I feel profoundly spurred to do it by my comrades at the time?